Our flight wasn't until 11:00am, so we didn't have to get up too early. We headed out to the main street in search of a cab. Alyssa always asks the hostel how much transportation to the airport should be and then refuses to accept higher than that price, which I admire about her. We refused the first cab and then found a cab who said he would just use the meter, which should give us the fairest price. We got in and headed off towards the airport. It was a good thing Alyssa was paying attention for although we had told him which airport to take us to (there are two in Bangkok), he was taking us to the wrong one! He apologized and turned around to go to the right one, but that made our cab fare higher than it would have been otherwise. We made it to the airport with time to spare and headed to our gate. Our flight was delayed a few times and our gate changed, so we were wandering around the airport for quite a while. Te Tee and Jane had booked on a different airline so they had landed much earlier and had planned on waiting for us at the airport, but since we were so far behind them due to the delays, we emailed them and told them to meet us at the hotel. Finally we were airborne and since the flight was barely even an hour, we were there before we knew it.
Jane and Te Tee were returning from lunch right as we got out of the cab at the hotel. We had reserved two rooms, so I would be sharing with Te Tee and Jane and Alyssa and Taya would have their own room. This made sense because Te Tee, Jane and I were doing an overnight tour the following night that Alyssa and Taya were not doing, so we would needed to check out of the hotel for a night. The hotel was pretty nice, although I knew Te Tee was used to much fancier accommodation. I liked it that we were all in one place though; it makes things much simpler.
Once we had dropped off our bags, Te Tee and Jane took us to the "Black Elephant" restaurant they had lunch at earlier that day. The food was delicious and they had free wifi so Jane and I tried to get some postcards writen and some research done. After eating, we walked around town checking things out. Chaing Mai was much different than Bangkok. It was a small town and things were much less fancy. I found it charming though and liked that everything was walkable.
Once the sun began to set, we headed to the night market. I've never seen such a huge market and apparently they have it every night! We walked around for a few hours looking at all of the goods and eating delicious, super cheap food.
One thing new to us was the "lady boy" culture of Thailand. They are literally everywhere and often it is hard to tell if a lady of the night is a man or woman. When we were discussing why this was so prevalent in Thailand, it was proposed that it may be because Buddhist culture is so accepting and so the Thai people are as well as a result. But really no one seemed to know why it was such a big thing in Thailand as opposed to other Asian cultures.
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